Understanding Ourselves
A Cynical View of Humankind
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Frederick Taylor, the inventor of scientific management, compared the ideal employee to someone ‘so stupid and so phlegmatic’ that he resembled an ox. Drawing on Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug presents the legacy of that cynical model: timesheets, billable hours, key performance indicators, pay-for-performance programs, and warehouse workers whose every movement is monitored by closed-circuit television.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
A cynical view of humankind laid the foundations for capitalism. ‘What workers want most from their employers, beyond anything else is high wages,’ asserted one of the world’s first business consultants, Frederick Taylor some hundred years ago. Taylor made his name as the inventor of scientific management, a method premised on the notion that performance must be measured with the greatest possible precision in order to make factories as efficient as possible. Managers had to be stationed at every production line, stopwatch at the ready, to record how long it took to tighten a screw or pack a box. Taylor himself likened the ideal employee to be a brainless robot: ‘so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more closely resembles an ox.’
With this cheery message, Frederick Taylor grew to become one of the most renowned management scientists ever. In the early twentieth century, the whole world was giddy with his ideas—communists, fascists, and capitalists alike. From Lenin to Mussolini, from Renault to Siemens—Taylor’s management philosophy continued to spread. In the words of his biographer, Taylorism ‘adapts the way a virus does, fitting in almost everywhere.’
Of course, a lot has changed since Taylor’s day. You’ll now find plenty of start-ups where you can show up at the office wearing flip flops. And many workers these days have the flexibility to set their own hours. But Taylor’s view of humanity, and the conviction that only carrots and sticks get people moving, is as pervasive as ever. Taylorism lives on in timesheets, billable hours, and KPIs, in doctor pay for performance programmes and in warehouse staff whose very move is monitored by CCTV.